by G M Steenrod
He wondered briefly about the chance that had lead the man to the exit from his office building. After all, there were many places to stand in the city. The timing seemed overly coincidental given his conversation with Fillmore.
“You, Sir,” Kumar said to the man, “would burn down the domes with your nonsense. I'm not sure what you were thinking when you decided to lurk at this doorway, but your behavior is irresponsible. No reasoned, sane, and intelligent person would behave like you.”
The smaller man seemed to shrink in his unitard at Kumar's words. He leaned back heavily against the wall as if he had taken a blow.
Kumar looked at him triumphantly.
“Sir, I am a man of the Maker, just trying to help another man placed into my path. There is no need for insults. Maybe you should consider that a reasoned, sane, and intelligent person has risked himself in a world where he must face hatred because of his beliefs. Such a person as myself must have a strong compulsion to take such a risk.”
“That sounds like the reasoning of a criminal. Anything could motivate you,” Kumar retorted. He was intrigued at the man's reasoning however. He also showed some courage in the face of Kumar's verbal assault.
Kumar broke from the missionary abruptly and started toward his apartment down the busy sidewalk.
CHAPTER NINE
Mother's Love
A picture of her mother, Ada, filled the wall before her. She was a beautiful woman, with bountiful curly hair, a mix of Asian and Irish ancestry delicately sculpted onto her face, and always a slight glint of mischief illuminating her presence.
Several doctoral theses had been written on how Ada had shaped modern culture. Cassie had read many of them. They didn't make her mother or her mother's genius any clearer to her. During many of her mother's insights, she had been present. Despite the assumptions of those papers, Ada didn't work by logical processes. She stored information and spontaneously, after a period of gestation, burst forth with a concept. She then used logic to flesh out the concept or reveal the steps that would lead to the concept becoming real.
Throughout her childhood and teens, Cassie and Ada were constant companions. Cassie had been 5 when her father went MIA during the lunar assault. Her grandparents, the only other blood relatives she had alive at the time of her birth, were gone the year before her father's disappearance.
That left only Ada to care for Cassie. Ada never objected to the need. She was, however, concerned about the lack of peer contact for Cassie. Ada had been driven in part to advance scene technology to make sure Cassie had access to peers—in a safe and secure way.
Cassie's mind was very different than that of her mother. Her mother was a trailblazer, isolating and building new concepts, and racing ahead of the mental stagnation that had gripped the Earth for decades. The internet and the cloud experience were dominant during Cassie's childhood. Rather than spurring innovation, it had succeeded in limiting innovation to small iterations that were lauded as breakthroughs. Intensive, anonymous social censorship served to strangle the adventurous nature needed for the human spirit to soar. Ada's work came at the time when computing power exploded with the true quantum chip, and the Ether emerged.
A few of those doctoral theses argued that Ada had provided the market drive that caused the quantum chip to be more than a dry scientific experiment. If not for her, the chip would have been used only in the extreme, rapid fire calculations of space travel.
Cassie grew up with her mother's discoveries. To her the technology was second nature. Her command of the hardware and the mechanics of the scenes technology came from being immersed in that world. She was not technically inclined.
For her the technology was little more than paint and brush to a master painter.
Cassie looked at the large image of her mother on the screen before her. It was the recent one from 7 years ago. The technology that had been used to capture the image was out of date. An average person wouldn't be able to detect the difference in the image. Many improvements, motivated in part by Cassie's creations, had been integrated into the modern imaging systems. Those changes were lacking in this image. That lack irritated her a little every time she looked at it.
“Hello, Mom.” The image came to life and smiled at Cassie.
“Hi, Little Girl. How are you doing?” Ada's image responded. The software to animate images that would draw on a database of prior scenes was actually created by Ada for space travel. It too had advanced in the intervening years since Ada created it.
“I'm doing well, Mom.” Cassie had resolved herself to Ada no longer being in her life years ago. However, she was reluctant to use the screen of her as sometimes it would trigger a flood of uncontrolled emotion. She could feel a little tremor of emotion today. Her support routine, which she had brought back intensively after her fit of rage, was buying her some control.
The imaging system used the profile designator of deceased to prevent the formation of delusions. The scene reality was strong enough that a grieving person could entertain the idea of a deceased person being alive. It would be very cautious about pushing the wrong emotional buttons in Cassie.
“Is there something I can do for you today or did you just want to chitchat?”
“Mom, I want to go through your logs today. I have a hazy memory about you talking about the emotive glyph.”
“Okay, Baby. Did you want me to just play the recordings?”
“Just play the recordings. Start with the oldest scene logs.”
In the first recordings, Cassie is a toddler. She could see herself playing in the background of her mother's recordings. The scene was capable of interacting with her during the playback. Having her own quantum chip ensured a life-like response filled with complex subtleties. The responses were interpolations based on data in the scene, and a psychological profile. That would not be helpful here.
Cassie was looking for something that resonated as an echo in her deep subconscious. While she had fully understood his reasons, she had been disturbed by Samuel's rejection of the scenes. It was not the first scene he had rejected. He eventually rejected all of them. It was the thought that there might be a way to form a glyph that Samuel could understand that triggered an impulse in her. A memory about her mother saying something relevant, something important.
It was enough that the chip could effectively search for anything that might lead to the conversation surrounding the glyph. Cassie new that Ada had started working formally on the project when she was 4. Ada redoubled her efforts when Patrido went MIA, when Cassie was 5.
She announced, demo'd, and started selling licenses to the emotive glyph within a year.
Cassie reviewed years of logs, slightly fast forwarded, sometimes with the conversation transcribed onto the screen. After 4 hours, she had walked through the bulk of her mother's work. She had a much better understanding of how her mother had formed the glyph, and what she had been struggling to do.
Normally, sense data must be processed by the receiver's brain into a series of responses to the data. It is evaluated. Using the glyph, her mother could bridge the processing, and basically give the user's brain direct emotional information that it didn't have to process. Of course, the mood wasn't completely controlled, but when there was a harmony between the sense data and the glyph, the response was intense. When the match was poor, it felt manipulative and weak.
Samuel trotted in and sat beside Cassie. Cassie smiled at him and scratched his head.
“Mom, do you have any references to the next step past the glyph? Were you working on anything after the glyph?”
Ada had a restless genius. She had continued improving the glyph libraries long after her discovery. Rivals used her published concepts, and generated their own libraries. These independent libraries only served to enshrine her work as being the best, after which she raised the price of licensing.
She enjoyed small clever turns of fate like that, but small gains wouldn't satisfy her. Cassie knew her mother was always look
ing for the next big challenge. She needed it to mask her grief over Patrido.
“Hmmm. No, not that dealt with the glyph. I took it a bit easy after your Dad went missing. I just wanted to spend time with you, and process.”
“What were you working on after Dad?”
Ada's image stared up into the sky as if remembering.
“Let me see. I took some time off. We traveled, do you remember? We went to your grandparents' home. I needed to connect in with my past.”
Cassie had forgotten, but it came quickly back to her. Her grandparents home had been only about 65 miles away. Cassie had visited several times throughout her teen years. It had become a kind of refuge for her. Her grandmother, Mary, had been an artist. Cassie liked to sit in her studio, taking it all quietly in. She felt Mary to be a kindred spirit.
It was the remembrance of her grandparent's house that had caused her to build her own home in its current location.
“What about after that?” Cassie asked.
“Baby, you haven't had anything to eat or drink. Do you want to take this to the kitchen? It'll give me time to remember. That was awhile ago.”
“You're right.” Cassie scooped up Samuel and headed to the kitchen. On the screens, Ada walked beside her to the kitchen, commenting on fashion. Ada had a penchant for jewelry that was accurately represented by the software.
Cassie sat at the kitchen island with a hastily made pastrami sandwich, a pickle, and a glass of water. Samuel sniffed about the kitchen corners with his short, Pug nose. Now and then, he would get a forbidden scrap—a prize from Cassie’s modification of the cleaning bot.
The scene of Ada was on a strategically placed screen pillar that would transmit the image of the kitchen surroundings as if the pillar was not there to obstruct the video. To a regular observer, Ada would seem present at the counter.
“So, what were you working on?” Cassie continued, between mouthfuls.
“Well, I shifted over to software that could really use the power of the quantum chip and the Ether. Most of what was out didn't exploit what was available for processing power.”
Her mother was very good at recognizing holes in culture and technology. The bulk of her software had been to compensate for the loss of social skills that had started with social media back in the days of the internet.
“When did you start work?”
“I think I started about 6 months after your Dad.”
Cassie's memory of that time was weak. She had been at her Grandparent's home. The representation of Ada wouldn't lie, because it was programmed to act with high truth. The software had run the vid logs in the background, and analyzed the speech for content indicators. If no work was done during that period, then no work was done.
“What were the logs from that time like?” asked Cassie. She felt herself drawn to that period. It had an odd feeling to it.
“I was working through a lot of loss at that time. I was just making short vignettes. About my relationships mostly.”
As Ada spoke, her words seemed discordant with Cassie's experience of that same time. She was 5, but she remembered her mother working constantly. While she appreciated, as an adult, the loss that her mother experienced had been greater than the one she had experienced, she knew that Ada was not one to spend an entire day exploring her emotions. Ada had always had an instant honesty and awareness of emotion.
“Play some of them please, Mom.”
Ada played some of the logs. They were at the home of Cassie's grandparents. Cassie could recognize the antique wooden furniture. Part of her grandfather, Mike's, taste. She could see herself playing in the background of a few of logs. She was absent from many of them. Cassie had been glued to her mother during this time. She had had a fear of ghosts that emerged suddenly in her grandparent's home. It would have been difficult to record the vids without her present.
“Mom, I'm not seeing a lot of me in these logs.”
“Yeah, that's unusual. Could just be chance,” Ada responded.
“Can you isolate the logs with me in them...” Cassie had a sudden insight borne from her many scenes. A scene wasn't a pure presentation of reality. The scene excluded large parts of reality and focused it toward a desired objective. Her mother had taught her that principle.
“...No. What's the log that has me present the longest?”
“That would be the tea party, Baby,” the software nailed the emphasis exactly. Ada's tone was excited and filled with love. The software started the log without prompting.
The memory of the scene flooded into Cassie. It had an intensity that made it hard for her to breath and she gasped under the load of it. The tea party was one of the fondest memories that Cassie had from her early childhood. She had had tea many times, mostly with her stuffed toys, but periodically with her mother.
There was something about this tea, though. It had been perfect. Each moment had executed with a free flowing beauty.
She watched it unfold on the screen.
“Beautiful.”
“Yes, Cassie, it was.”
The scene had expanded to fill the screens fully in the kitchen. The kitchen had good screen coverage, although it was no encounter room.
Cassie was drawn fully into the scene. She walked about the kitchen like a ghost visiting the event, examining small details; There was the curl of her hair. The way the light caught the small plastic cups. The young Cassie had hosted it outdoors, so there was the interplay of shadows among the blades of grass.
Cassie's memory played out as the scene played. She was fully absorbed into it, and had lost awareness of her environment. Her memory was different in small ways. The scene recorded from a different angle than the point of view of young Cassie. She was drawn into the idle chatter of young Cassie with her mother. When she was a child, Cassie had always felt that a special type of “tea conversation” was needed for tea parties.
As an observer she had also not remembered the dog barking. It seemed discordant with the scene. It was fortunate that she had not noticed it as a child. It could have spoiled the moment. The barking was getting louder and more persistent.
Cassie stirred from her memory as she would stir from a dream. Samuel was barking. He was by her foot barking at a dragon fly that hovered menacingly near.
“Samuel, that can't hurt you, you silly....” Cassie froze momentarily.
“Alfie, command set,” she stated to the air. She bent down to the dragonfly and gestured at it. It froze. She gestured at it again. It bubbled slightly. Responsive? It was a glyph. A glyph. Samuel was responding to a glyph!
“Alfie, put this up in my lab.”
Ada faded from the screens, except for a small portrait. Cassie scooped up Samuel and raced down the hall to the screen room. She set Samuel down and Samuel looked up at her with a quizzical look.
“I'm okay, Samuel.” He continued to inspect her.
“I don't care for your skepticism, but I do take the love that it comes from.” Cassie pulled her calligraphy set from the console and walked over to the dragonfly. She gestured at it with her hand. The glyph and the image stack expanded out.
The glyph itself seemed unusual. Cassie didn't recognize it. Taking the brush from her set, she gestured at the glyph again. It separated into 2 glyphs. She pulled on both glyphs with a brush swipe. The second glyph bubbled and indicated that it had its own image stack.
Cassie stared at it. A lot of people experimented with glyph structures. While glyphs and stacks had advanced, the structure had remain largely unchanged. This was new.
She couldn't help but feel a bit of pride for her mother.
Cassie pulled at the second glyphs image stack. The screen around her flashed erratically for a couple of seconds, and then Ada came up on the screen before her.
“Hi, Baby Girl. I think it's probably been a long time since we talked in person. I want you to know that I love you and care for you. By this point, you've seen the new structure I was working on. It's a proof of concept for y
ou. More than anything else, you should know that this is me and my work.”
Cassie gasped.
“I need you to do something for me. Instruct your quantum to give me control. It'll tell you what's going on with the system, but you need to do so right now. We don't have much time.”
The urgency in her mother's tone tugged at her. Ada was passionate and impulsive, but she had never been an alarmist.
“Alfie, surrender control to the...Ada software.”
“Yes, Madam.” The change, a massive reconfiguring of protocols took only a second or two. “It's done. Madam, the system is being put into diagnostic mode and all connections to the Ether have been severed.”
“Cassie, I'm not altering any of your software. I'm just isolating us. Could you turn off Alfie, please?”
Cassie hesitated. The quantum would be completely standalone and there would be no record of activities. The moment would be truly invisible. She was a little giddy at that thought.
